lukepracticescollaboration

[lukepracticescollaboration]

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[lukepracticescollaboration]

My friend Rich and his collaborative partner Jen, both in Illustration, made a film for their collaborative practice. I am so glad they asked for my help to make it. They had a story about someone being catfished on an online dating site where the date turns out to be an actual catfish, but this is actually everything the victim really wanted. A strange romance, inspired by Greasy Strangler and Necromantik. By the time I could help them, they were floundering on the story and it was turning into an experimental film. I convinced Rich to keep a narrative and we goofed a simple one out. I hired out some gear, a Canon c100 (for battery life) with a mono-pod (love that thing) and the DJI Osomo. We went into town with the mask and shot with just the story in our heads. It was fun and exciting, seeing everyone’s reactions or no reaction to catfish walking about. We got kicked out of a a couple places but the fish market guys were great. We can probably not go back to the Eagle and Ball for long while after stinking the place out with simulated fish sex. The chef was fuming. Halfway through filming Rich and Jen wanted to drop the narrative again, but I convinced them otherwise once more, so glad I did.

I love this film, I loved my part in making it, I adore Rich’s animated shots, they compliment the simple love story so well. I wish there was more time to help tighten the edit some more and do a colour grade, but still, its great, so glad to be involved.

Going back to something I said in my last blog about how important it is to find people you work well with and enjoy working with, this reinforces that point to me. This is when collaboration works best, when it seems easy and fun.

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Ident

I had not really done much frame by frame animation before, so decided to utilize my Wacom screen laptop and practice with Photoshop’s animation timeline. I roto-scoped the body and improvised the rest, building it all in After Effects.  Frame by frame animation is extremely tedious and I am not the strongest artist at all, so in the future I shall go back to using it in small parts when it is appropriately needed.

The MTV idents in the 90′s were amazingly creative snipits of animation that were some of the weirdest stuff you’d see and so varied in styles and themes. Very inspirational on me

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We have a name for our screening we are curating, Curination. Some crap I spouted out while we were working that somehow stuck. Matt suggested everybody do an ident for our screening, with this name you know what to expect.

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Venue

We had a few options that Emily has enquired about, with The Mockingbird being the best from her list. I went over to the Woodman and they said we could use their upstairs function room. Its available just about every afternoon, we would just need to provide a screen, speakers and projector. With it being so close, this became the preferred option.

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Playlist

I invited everyone to come in on a non-lesson day to try and sort out a play list. Hayley, Sophie, Sabba, and Oana joined me with Abhishek turning up too.

We all had a few more films each to share. We watched ones posted on yammer by others and also found a few more as we went. Then we tried to narrow down a playlist to run at about an hour. This is what we got:

When I'm Scared Fixed Noah Unsatisfying Frenezie The Dogist Anonymous Mortician Supervenus Reinvention of normal Jackpot Scavengers Damo & Darren La Béte The Jump It's a date Velodrool I'm Fine Thanks

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This is the another one I liked by a French guy called Frederic Doazan. He and his French buddy have this website with loads of cool short animations and junk, 12fps.net. It was done with Photoshop, very simple but extremely effective, gets the point across perfectly.

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Researching at home, I found this little gem. Its really short, only 45 seconds. It is animation done to a sound clip, the pictures support the clip well. And it’s disgusting. Has to be in our screening.

The animator Joe Bennett has also worked on a stunning animated short called Scavengers which has won all the awards at all the festivals. I would have recomended it for our screening but I think it is to professional, not within our range. Take a look:

https://vimeo.com/179779722

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Further research for suitable films

After work check checkpoint with Cusworth, I sat with Sabba and her gigantic laptop as we searched films for the screening, mostly on Shortoftheweek.com, which is a library for great short films and animation.

We came across a few suitable ones including:

The Invention Of Normal, a documentary about a quirky inventor. It included animated segments and was very entertaining and engaging.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2015/03/27/reinvention-normal/

The Dogist, a documentary about a lonely dog photographer and connects with people through his occupation. It starts out like a click-bait animal video but ends with a bit of human emotion.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/02/05/the-dogist/

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My choice for our curation

I have been following Michael Cusack for a while. He is a young Australian animator, who is really hard to find information on, except that he uses Flash. He has a website called gillsberry.com with a bunch of short animation.

Damo and Darren is a short he made about 3 years ago, it got a lot of heat on YouTube and he has made 4 more episodes, becoming very popular in Australia. Cliche Skate company has made Damo and Darren signature decks.

Cusack has written, directed and produced a live action feature called All Night Gamer, which is in waiting while he finds funding to finish the post production.

I chose this animation for the curation because of one of Tromans requirements was that it should be something that we could do. He also said it should inspire us. I think I could do something like Damo and Darren and it inspires me to try.

The group feedback was minimal but positive.

Yeah its very Beavis and Butthead, yeah I love Beavis and Butthead, blah blah blah turd in my pants or just crappy to see you?

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Evaluation

We practiced the spit out of some collaboration, yes sir.  

I do sometimes listen. At the end of L4 when it was stated and repeated that the Collaborative Practice was very intense and would require full time attendance, I acted upon this and worked full time over the summer at my shitty job, so that I would be free to put my full efforts into this module. This is the reason why my summer output of creative work was minimal. Also after not working from September to December, it looks like I have done myself out of a shitty yet comfortable job. Oh well, nothing great comes from being comfortable.

This project, for me was about working together in a group, to standards similar to industry practice, to produce a short film that reflects those industry standards, and all on (an appreciated) steep learning curve. Within the collaborative aspect there was the creative input, pooling and use of ideas. Roles and responsibilities of group members and the dynamics of how these worked together. Let me take you through some examples.

This story begins with preparation for filming, where Phoebe and myself made sure we had the appropriate storyboards and shot lists planned out, we had a shooting order and with the rehearsals we had scheduled in to familiarize the crew with their roles, we had reference to refine those shot lists. Our rigging day also went well, so with all this planned and executed preparation, I believe we did pretty much all we could to be ready for filming. I would have liked to have given myself a little more time to concentrate on my personal artistic vision in relation to my directing duties but with completion of set and props dragging on due to illness/ absence / other and also our Subject in Context hand in right before shooting, I did not find the time. In hindsight, I wish I had just taken that time for myself and let the set and props be, instead of picking up from the lack of pro-action and impetus elsewhere.

With all our preparation, I expected filming to run smoother but I was extremely tired on the first morning, and with lighting problems involving fixing an LED in our lantern, it was very start stop and the crew, including myself were a bit apprehensive in their roles when it came to studio conditions, something that we could not prepare for. Because of the slow start we did not have time to experiment with a couple of creative shots we had planned involving taking off half of the belly’s fabric and shooting through the bones. The afternoon was much better, we got into a good flow and everyone was now comfortable in their roles, especially after Ingrida took over boom mic from Daniella, who had trouble keeping focus on her job.

On day 2 of shooting we also struggled to get our shots done and the task of green screen shooting took its toll with orientating sets and lighting for different camera angles, something we did not fully take into account in our planning. This struggle to complete our shot list in given time cut any play or creative changes from my mind during the shoot which was a shame because it kept everything rigidly stuck to the pre-determined story. If I could go back, I would like to do just a couple of takes with a completely different story made up at the time, for each of the scenes, a bit of improvised story which would have given us a different dynamic and options come editing. I understand that getting the shots to tell your story is the fundamental task when shooting, but after the editing process, I have seen that just a little experimentation and creativity on the shoot could have gone a long way to telling a more engaging story.

We spent our time between shoot days well, reviewing our footage straight away and doing a rough edit of those scenes, which told us what shots we needed to pick up, redo some shots for narrative options and plan a costume change and reshoot. On shoot day 3 things went a lot smoother and some experimentation was possible with the underwater scene, this was mostly due to me not really planning specific shots with just a rough vision in my head, so shooting this scene was really scheduled experimentation. We had the jib, the dolly track and a whole lot of green to play with and this was the most fun I had during the shoot. It was a relaxed and playful atmosphere with no formal shot list, just a let’s try this attitude. I liked the fact that we were making it up as we went and I preferred directing this way. One thing that worked well was when I tied the fishing rod line to his hat to simulate water flow pushing it off on his aquatic decent. Working with Phoebe was good, she helped burden the pressure I felt during shooting, I think we had a good relationship with communication, thinking over angles whether we had what we needed and she would offer ideas and request alternate angles or retakes, of which I was grateful.

Postproduction was an exercise in endurance for me. Yes, I admit that I put this all on myself and I knew this beforehand. Our film was so heavy on effects because of our compromises in preproduction.  I know Matt said in the group critic of our films that maybe I should have taken a day to teach somebody a little After Effects to share the burden. I would have liked that but like I’ve said before, I was present every day that first week and half of preproduction and would have gladly shown a willing group member. Unfortunately, the people who showed interest where the people who were most unreliable.  I would have really liked to have had more editing time and its almost laughable that despite my colossal effect duties I easily did more than most in my group. I was particularly disappointed in the Film and Animation contingent in my group concerning editing.

The main thing that I would do differently in hindsight is curtail my ambitions slightly. It is good to be ambitious but I read the conditions incorrectly, as working in a group, not everyone is going to work the way that you work especially in terms of effort. That is not a dig at anybody, more so at myself for having unrealistic expectations. With a simpler, more achievable production, we would have had more time to do the things that I found enjoyable in this project, like having time to experiment on shoot days and focus on aspects that went out of the window like the dramatic units.  A more achievable production may also have gotten the group more on board and involved, as with this project I did feel like I was dragging everyone along, trying to get on with things, with less to do maybe people would have had more time to find their feet and stay more involved, it’s hard to say.

Should I have pushed members of the group harder for more input from them? I don’t think this would have had a positive effect, the girls were quite defensive and opinionated when I brought up attendance. They seemed to have collective sand in their fannies with this fixation about too many people in the edit suit at once and their precious schedule. I had a problem with not enough people in the edit suit, with or without this schedule. I know editing is not enjoyed by everybody, I’m not too keen on it myself but this is collaborative work and not showing up put extra work on other people, so I must give enormous credit to Ellie and Ingrida, without whom, the film would not have gotten finished.

I know I have given the impression that I hate Belly of the Beast, mainly by repeatedly saying that I hate it and never want to see it again. This is not completely true, it’s partly me being the surly bastard that I am, but I do think that it could have been so much better, for all the reasons stated above, but there are things I do like about it. There is not one scene that is great, but aspects of each scene are good. The pan down sun setting jib shot on the front of the pier I think is great, with the backgrounds and animated sea. It’s a shame it was not in the film as a complete shot. Stepping down into the case is also good, it is one of the few physical effects that survived. The booth looked great on camera. My dad’s performance was great and working with him was lovely and I know he enjoyed it too. You might not expect to hear this but working with the girls was enjoyable, I got along well with them all outside of the work, maybe they have a different opinion.

Even though I said it was something I would do differently, being ambitious is something that I liked about this project, for me personally and I’m glad I pushed myself, even though it did not work for the group and even alienated them. I proved to myself that it is something I can handle even if it did burn me out by the end.  I think my problem with Belly of the Beast is that being so involved with two and a half months of hard work, I have ended up with something I am not happy with and I want to distance myself from it. I believe it could have been better and that irritates me, which is a good thing, but still I have no intention of going back to it any time soon.

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I done gone read a book

I’ve been following Jay Dyer for a few years now. His film essays on his website jaysanalysis.com are a good read and his book is an collection of these that have been extended on with added explanation of references.

The thesis of his book is film as ritual, with mass attendance at theaters fundamentally religious in character. It is a ritual process at work with screens used to guide the mass conscience through esoteric meaning. At least I think so, his introduction requires a dictionary and a few read throughs, luckily the rest of the book is in a more comfortable vernacular.

His analysis delves deep with philosophy, geopolitics and of course the occult being focal points in his deconstruction of his selected films. He has chapters on Kubric, Speilberg, 007, fantasy dystopia and Hitchcock. His analysis is very in depth and usually relates plot points and details to real life esoteric knowledge and events as well as giving his own thesis on the what the director was trying to say.

Although not in the book, I have recently read his online analysis of Goonies, one of my childhood favourites. Jay says that the true meaning of the film is about its location and its hidden history. The town of Astoria was founded by the Astor family, the first multi-millionaires in America and their and the town’s hidden history is what the hidden caves the goonies stumble upon really are. The Astor’s had connections to the Mafia (Frattellis), privateering (One Eye Willy) and were prominent Freemasons (the whole hidden history part). I thought it was just a goofy kids film. Have a read:

https://jaysanalysis.com/2016/12/19/the-goonies-is-about-the-illuminati-and-its-a-rube-goldberg-machine-jay-dyer/

I highly recommend this book, but I’m a tool, so take that as it is.

Also, I just heard on Jay’s latest interview that he has a telling box show coming in April called Hollywood Decoded, in co-operation with Jay Weidner of Kubric’s Odyssey notoriety, on Netficks or Amazon tv .

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A little bit of Analysis

The opening shot(s) was something that I I really like, its a shame the jib shot was not used in full, I wish I had gone and put the last shot of him coming to the pier as the full shot. I think it looks great, particularly with Daniella’s great background. It works well to show time passing and I like the camera going down with the setting sun.  I also like how it shows the city of sin sinking away far behind him, like it is something he is leaving and disassociating himself from. The shots looking at him have the contrasts of both tone and colour with the bright city against the blues of him, the sky and the sea. These two shots show where he is coming from, the sin city, to what is before him, the wonder of the stars. Maybe he picked one to wish upon. I wish I had put in a shooting star here. Him choosing to climb in is a choice I made, there was talk of him falling in, but I wanted him to have entered the booth in control of his path.

The booth scene looks great and I particularly like the part where he is playing the game and I cut it in a way to look like he is the one being played by the machine, being bounced back and forth with the cuts. I wish I had made this clearer and more prominent. When he draws the curtain back you see how he came in, from a deep space into this very limited space in the booth. The majority of shots after he has put his money in are looking down on him, taking power away from him.  He loses control of his path, falling down through the trapdoor, from the limited space booth, back to deep space.

Underwater is strange, I’m not sure we showed the ambiguous space very clearly, I had wanted debris and sea weed floating around him. I had also wanted to put in propulsion swirls from the whale, as I referenced in my research with the Rhyme of the Modern Mariner where the round, circular swirls hint that the whale is friendly.  There is the fisherman flipping over from his back, righting himself and regaining some control but with the whale shadow foretelling what is to come. When the whale swallows him, it uses all the deep space, coming from beyond sight to engulfing the screen on a steep diagonal line.

The belly scene was edited to start close in on the fisherman and as he discovers his surroundings so does the viewer as the shots get wider, so we start with limited space and it gets deeper as we see where he is culminating in that single point perspective wide shot. The swimming motion, I like. It’s rhythmic, which is calming and kind of nurturing, like rocking a baby, which I think helps emphasize the belly as this place where he is reborn into a new man and provided with the things he needs for his new life. The mouth opening shot is a favourite of mine. The light sweeping up his body and him stepping out into it works well. He is central in that single point perspective, with those circular whale bones framing him. As he walks towards the camera, he is above us, we are looking up at him, he takes back that power / control.

On the beach we see the bum, he is sitting on the ground, he has no power, he is bellow the fisherman. I made sure that above the bum’s head is the Auto-Faith symbol, with the lights in a line pointing down to the bum. This foreshadows what is instore for him.

The ending starts with the beach shot being revealed on a screen and it pulls back in a twisting motion to reveal our twist ending, ta-diddly-da, it was all planned by the machine / Auto-Faith the whole time and the story will perpetuate in a cyclical fashion.  I like this, as it takes it from a happy ending to an ambiguous one, where either he has found happiness and wants to share it, or maybe the fisherman could have been indoctrinated into a cult, where the corporate Auto-Faith now owns him and uses him as a propaganda mouth piece and to prey upon other lost souls, recruiting them into sexual slavery, performing perverted acts on soulless, emotionally devoid business men and used as a receptacle for their fetid sour seed.

Does the film carry its message? Not particularly well. Its a message of redemption, but the fisherman does not really have to do anything but choose to initiate the journey. Once he does that, it all just happens to him. There is not a lot of conflict and resolution so his journey is really a series of bizarre events. These bizarre events are at least visually interesting and I think my dads performance helps carry the viewer through (but I am biased, he’s my dad and I like watching him goof about). A little more conflict and emotion would have gone a long way. Like Tommy Wiseau pleaded from his poor cast on The Room, “More Emotion!!”. (if you have not seen The Room then stop reading this bullshonk and go make your life more enriched and fulfilled simply by watching a masterpiece in shitty film making. Then when you are in awe and bemusement about what you have just seen, get the audio book The Disaster Artist by actor Greg Sestero about the making of The Room and his friendship with the bizarre Wiseau. It has to be the audio book for Sestero’s impressions of Tommy Wiseau, you’ll know why when you’ve seen the film. And do this now before squinting James Franco ruins it all with his film based on the book .

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Don’t know how I found this film (torrrent site zooqle actually). Glad I did find it. It is terrible. Written by a couple of drunks, starring a whole host of inebriated people, Peter Cooke has a drink in his hand in every shot he is in.  I would have stopped it near the beginning but people keep turning up; look that’s Cheech & Chong, there’s Eric Idle, is that Nigel Planner, that’s Spike Milligan, James fucking Mason and I think I saw David Bowie.

With all the comedians in the film, I found James Mason made me laugh the most, the strict Captain that that makes sure his crew don’t bring women on board, himself has an officer called Mister Prostitute. When his first mate apologises for interrupting them, he says “I was only smoking a cigar”, with her legs wrapped around him as he intensely stares at her smoking.

Its a bad film, not really funny but has its moments, not great to look at, but it has this strange warmth to it that I believe is because you can see they are having fun. It must have been fun to make this film and that shines through. Much like the Cannon Ball Run films where from the gag reel over the credits you can see a drunk Burt Reynolds is laughing his ass off through the whole film, I think that makes a difference to the finished film with a good vibe coming through the screen.

While growing up, the amount of times a shitty Carry On film was the only thing on the telling box and I had never heard of Yellowbeard before. I feel a little cheated that when I watched some shonk, it could at least have been entertaining shonkk like this.

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Matt got told on

Some idiot made a complaint about Matt being too involved and because of that Matt told us he would be less involved with all the groups. I found this a bit unfair on all the other people that wanted Matt to be involved, so that we could learn from his involvement.

I know it wasn’t a member of Film and Animation that made the complaint, I’ve spoken to most of them about it and they all feel the way I do, that Matt’s knowledge is valuable to us and his help much appreciated.

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Colour Grading

There was a phrase that the girls bandied around frequently with glee all throughout the making of our film and it appeared often on Ellie’s shot logging.

Luke fucked up!

On the morning of colour grading the first time this happened was when we found out I had not rendered the Premiere effects out properly. There is an option when you right click on a shot that says render out. I presumed that this would render it out. But it didn’t and we had to spend some time rendering out the shots. This was no real problem.

It was when Matt discovered that I had rendered all my After Effects shots (which was every shot in the film) in the incorrect format that a deafening chorus of “Luke fucked up!” screamed from inside of my head, resonating within that sparse cavity. I had mostly rendered out to h.264 but there was also a couple Animation codec files and the odd random other codec. I was mostly annoyed at myself  because this something I have been taught, I remember the lesson and know that the files should have been Apple ProRes 422. I have no idea why I did not do this, my only explanation is that in my haste with the heavy workload I bypassed this detail and the default setting was used.

The file formats I used were not as high quality as they should have been. This lost information had a detriment on the quality of the final version of our film. The colour grade had less information to work with, so we had a worse looking film than we should have produced. Entirely my fault.  I later apologised to the group, although I don’t think most of them really understood what I had done wrong.

Not much we could do about what “Luke fucked up!”, so we got on with colour grading what we had.

The grading process was quite straight forward for our film, the girls were physically there but engaged in work for a TPE deadline. It was mostly Phoebe and myself working with Matt. I remember we used a LUT for the most of it and tweaked it for each scene. We tried many variations on the booth scene but I think we went back and used the first one we tried. In the pier scene we blured the background slightly to give it a bit of depth but looking back, it just makes the drawings look pixelated like they have been over enlarged.

Matt was very knowledgable about the grading process and it was good that we did it with him otherwise it would have taken a week.  I was very tired and my concentration was poor during grading, I’m sure Matt could tell. I was very relieved to have gotten it done. No sense of achievement, just relief.

Addendum;  I went back and looked in After Effects at formats to render in.  I could not find ProRes422 so I looked this up and it turns out that on the Windows versions of all Adobe software it is absent because Apple would not license it to Windows products.  So If I have not already asked in person, could you please tell me the best alternative file format for us pathetic Windows PC users.